Giant Facebook Acquires Shopping Search Engine TheFind

Bangalore: Facebook, the online social networking service site, has moved into the e-Commerce space by acquiring a search engine company, TheFind. Facebook acquired the nine year-old search app with an aims to improve ads experience. However, Facebook did not reveal details of the acquisition, including the amount it paid for this deal.

TheFind was founded in 2006 by CEO Siva Kumar and CTO Shashikant Khandelwal. It indexes products across thousands of e-Commerce sites. The nine year-old company previously raised $26 million in three investment rounds, but had not received an influx of cash since 2007.

Concerning the acquisition, Facebook says, “Both Facebook and TheFind cast the acquisition as a way to lift the digital advertising business of Facebook and to make the ads more relevant and better for consumers. Facebook has been testing a buy button since July 2014 that lets users purchase goods directly. Now, with TheFind, it would be able to add additional shopping tools to its service”.

TheFind says, “We are the only comparison shopping platform with retail/product based crawling capabilities that rivals the Google Shopping platform. We are now starting our next chapter by combining forces with Facebook to do even more for consumers. Facebook resources and platform provide us the opportunity to extent our expertise in product sourcing to over 1 billion people that use the platform”.

Many of TheFind’s employees would be joining Facebook, and work on improving the relevance of the social network’s advertising. The search engine will go offline in the next few weeks.